Hi guys, I'm a designer interviewing for new jobs right now. I'm having some anxiety about my portfolio going into these interviews, because a large portion of my latest work is under a non disclosure agreement. To avoid any legal nonsense, I have excluded these projects in my interviews despite them showcasing my best and most recent work. I'm worried that I'm not showing what I'm capable of. My question is how do I work around this? Should I just make a couple of my own projects to accurately show my skills now? Is there a way to show this work without breaking the contract? Thanks for the help!

Your best bet is to do a couple of concept projects that show off your skills. You can then also have a couple of place holder slide for each of the projects that are on the way with silhouette the new product with some text that says "xxx" product, launching "xxx" date so they can see you have production work coming, you can't show it, but you can confirm you have that experience.

In my experience, it is a small world. You never know who knows who. If you are interviewing with a consulting firm or a competitor, you defiantly don't want to expose yourself to not only breach of contract, but liability. Your most important asset is your reputation.

As yo says it's a small world, I have shown things in interviews that were not released, but at the time it was for industries that were wholly different from anything I had worked on in the past, and I assumed that risk. I have former colleagues who had shared work during an interview and the director of company X wound up being good friends with his boss, and immediately called him up to let him know what he had just seen.

The only thing that could save you is if any part of the project has been publicly revealed. Once that happens you can consider the project itself public domain although the development work you did is still covered under NDA. It really depends on where you work for and how serious they are. If you were to share the iPhone 11 design you'd likely be fired within 45 minutes. If you work on point of purchase designs for trade shows, chances are no one would know the difference unless you were going to your nearest competitor for an interview.